On the way back that evening, Wang Zihao suddenly spoke up. "I just saw Zhou Yuwen."
"Who?" Chen Yansen was momentarily puzzled, the name ringing a bell but not immediately placing it.
"Teacher Liu's ex-fiancé," Wang Zihao clarified.
"So what if you saw him?" Chen Yansen shifted in his seat, leaning back comfortably, his tone casual.
"What if he tells Teacher Liu he saw me at Galaxy Star?" Wang Zihao asked anxiously.
"Weren't you having the time of your life earlier?" Chen Yansen scoffed in retort.
"I regret it. A place like Galaxy Star isn't suitable for a pure young man like me," Wang Zihao said with remorse.
Chen Yansen rolled his eyes and ignored him. This bad habit could be cured with a few more trips to the mall.
Twenty minutes later, the car stopped at the foot of the teachers' apartment building. Chen Yansen got out and took the car keys from Wang Zihao. "See you tomorrow."
"Sigh, I wish I could be as carefree as Brother Sen," Wang Zihao muttered to himself, watching Chen Yansen's retreating figure.
The next morning, Chen Yansen walked into Room 206. He had barely sat down for two minutes when Zhao Maolin brought good news: the online mall collaboration was progressing.
The telecom company had purchased a batch of mobile phones last year and now had leftover inventory—multiple brands and models, with an estimated value exceeding 8 million yuan.
These phones were originally intended for high sales, but after the New Year, Huawei, Samsung, Coolpad, and Motorola all launched new spring models, far surpassing last year's in terms of screen, system, memory, and camera.
Consequently, these older models became slow-moving stock.
The headquarters had initially planned to bundle sub-1000-yuan phones with call credit promotions, and those over 1000 yuan with 59 or 79-yuan call credit packages, essentially giving them away.
Now that Zhao Maolin had proactively taken on the task, headquarters didn't hesitate and directly handed over this pile of depreciating inventory for him to handle.
"We originally agreed on 60% of the original price, but I don't know who messed up, and it ended up at 70%. Are you sure you can handle this? If not, I'll reject it," Zhao Maolin asked tentatively.
For example, the Huawei C8600, a telecom-customized phone with an original price of 1499 yuan, had been on the market for a year. Even if Chen Yansen returned all commissions, the selling price would still be 1050 yuan.
Frankly, with a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen, 320×480 resolution, 256MB RAM, and 512MB storage, it really wasn't cost-effective.
"Brother Zhao, do you have a product list?" Chen Yansen didn't decide immediately, wanting more details first. At the same time, he wasn't sure if this was a trick by Zhao Maolin.
"Yes, I'll have Wenwen send it to your email. Take a look when you have time. Let's go over the contract today," Zhao Maolin replied nonchalantly. At the moment, he was only concerned about the connection to the phone recharge portal.
"Alright, I'll create a group later," Chen Yansen readily agreed.
Ten minutes later, he opened the email from Gu Wenwen. It contained a dense list of over 60 products, all older models from 2009 and 2010, with inventory ranging from a dozen to five or six hundred units.
Based on the commission rates offered by Super Rebate, Chen Yansen calculated that the final price wouldn't offer much of a discount—at most 30-50 yuan cheaper than offline phone stores.
But those offline stores already had inflated prices.
After a moment's thought, Chen Yansen informed Zhao Maolin it couldn't be done.
FoxTao's users weren't fools. A phone with a market price of only 1100 yuan, listed at 1499, wouldn't offer a real discount. This would easily alienate users and damage their trust in Super Rebate. It wasn't worth it!
"It's better not to do it. Saves us from being taken advantage of by those idiots. They could've given an extra 10%, but they insisted on causing trouble," Zhao Maolin said, sighing with a hint of relief and laughter.
Chen Yansen smiled, said nothing more, and after hanging up, handed the telecom business over to the Major Account Development Department.
After the New Year, FoxTao held a campus recruitment fair, snapping up many outstanding talents from various departments before the spring recruitment season and adding five new members to the Major Account Development Department through social recruitment.
Most of these people had seven or eight, even over ten years of industry experience; they were all seasoned veterans with extensive brand and platform resources.
In this environment, Song Yuncheng grew rapidly. Besides daily efforts to promote the onboarding of B2C platforms, she also found time to discuss marketing plans with brands.
In the afternoon, after finishing a call, Song Yuncheng returned to her seat and excitedly reported to Chen Yansen, "President Chen, the Chery deal is settled. We'll sign the contract this week—4 million yuan in advertising fees, plus a 15% commission."
"Any ROI requirements?" Chen Yansen looked up and asked casually.
In 2011, for the other party to dare advertise on a shopping guide website was quite a bold move.
Even though FoxTao performed well in home improvement, major appliances, and digital products, with an average order value nearing 1000 yuan, the gap was still stark compared to cars costing tens of thousands.
"It's not stipulated in the contract, but their expectation is an ROI of 1.5. The final ratio will affect follow-up cooperation," Song Yuncheng explained carefully.
"Find Zhuang Rui and Wang Yunxia from the event team to draft a plan. Also, you need to comprehensively consider user needs for order tracking, vehicle delivery processes, and after-sales issues. Understand?" Chen Yansen instructed.
"Understood." Seeing him nod, Song Yuncheng followed his instructions and got up to find the product and event planning personnel.
Although she lacked confidence in this event, having received the client's money, she had to devise an effective plan.
Chen Yansen glanced around the second floor. He had rented all 16 offices, and the total number of employees had exceeded 160, with customer service and business development remaining the largest departments.
As the number of merchants increased, Xu Dan recruited seven more female editors from the School of Literature and Communication. As before, except for Li Bin, the entire editorial team consisted of young women.
At this stage of development, the responsibilities of each team at FoxTao were clearly defined.
Merchant recruitment primarily involved connecting with sellers on platforms like Taobao, JD.com, Suning, and Gome, serving them through brand flash sales, category days, and special events for major brands.
The Major Account Recruitment Department was responsible for introducing B2C platforms, executing major brand marketing plans, and negotiating cooperation on special categories.
The editorial team liaised with merchants, checked commission rate settings, and updated front-end titles and main images.
Li Bin was responsible for price comparison and controlling user experience.
The Category Operations Team reviewed merchant application forms and increased the variety of products and categories eligible for Super Cashback.
Additionally, there were departments like Technology, Activities, Design, Administration, Product, and Legal/Finance.
Each department performed its duties effectively, ensuring the project operated smoothly.
With over 100 brand group-buying deals launched daily, output didn't decrease despite dispersed traffic. This was because the website's daily active users had increased by 50% compared to last year, while user stickiness and repurchase frequency also steadily improved.
Three days later, Lashou launched its first brand group-buying deal on FoxTao, completely replicating Gaopeng.com's model.
Clearly, Lashou, which had just received $50 million in funding last year, was much more aggressive.
The selected products had commission rates around 40%-50%, and within 30 minutes of launch, they generated 1 million RMB in sales.
Total sales for the day reached 14 million RMB!
While heavy spending on shopping guide websites might not yield significant results, group-buying and shopping guides were a natural fit. Their user bases overlapped considerably; both were users who loved hunting for deals.
Upon learning that Lashou had generated 14 million RMB in sales on FoxTao in a single day, industry insiders immediately halted their TV and outdoor advertising investments.
Compared to the tangible, visible CPS advertising on FoxTao, those commercial campaigns where even impression counts were hard to track were a complete waste of time and money.
After the three-day event, Lashou.com's total sales reached 31 million yuan, nearly equivalent to half a month's revenue, and brought in almost 100,000 new customers.
Chen Yansen also made a considerable profit; Lashou paid him 4 million yuan just for new customer acquisition fees, not even counting the gross profit from the brand flash sales.
As soon as Lashou.com went offline, QQ Group Buying took over.
This made Wang Xin, who had been hesitant about increasing investment in affiliate marketing channels, regret his decision immensely, slapping his thigh in frustration.
The tens of millions in revenue had already shaken the market share of the group-buying industry.
The successive entry of Gaopeng.com and Lashou.com into FoxTao's mall cashback module meant group-buying users were now accustomed to jumping to FoxTao before placing orders.
After all, spending an extra 30 seconds could save an additional 3-5 yuan on a 100-yuan food group-buying deal—very much worth it.
Meituan, 24quan, and Wowo, which hadn't yet joined the platform, were in a panic. To get ahead, some even offered "queue-jumping fees" to recruitment staff, with amounts reaching 50,000 or 100,000 yuan at a time.
Chen Yansen quickly intervened, strictly forbidding recruitment staff from accepting "queue-jumping fees" from group-buying platforms. He threatened to call the police immediately if anyone was caught, which finally calmed the restless recruitment agents.
"These bastards, they're really willing to spend money," Chen Yansen cursed under his breath.
He couldn't help but recall his past life, when, just a few years into his career, he had to bribe recruitment staff with 100,000 yuan just to get a chance to skip the queue and see samples for a collaboration with a top live-streaming sales host.
Yes—just to see samples!
Want to get directly on a live stream? Sorry, you'd have to pay more!
Having had similar experiences, Chen Yansen naturally knew how to stop this kind of chaos.
After his intervention, the situation quickly returned to normal, and the major group-buying platforms behaved themselves considerably.